Microsoft Build 2025 Keynote: Agentic Web, Copilot, and Azure AI Updates

Building the Agentic Web

• 💡 Microsoft is transitioning from vertically integrated apps to a platform enabling an open, scalable, agentic web.
• 🚀 This platform aims to expand opportunities for developers across all layers of technology.

Developer Tools and Copilot Enhancements

• 💻 Visual Studio receives updates including .NET 10 support, live preview, improved Git tooling, and a new cross-platform debugger.
• 🌐 VS Code now integrates AI-powered capabilities directly into its core, open-sourcing Copilot features.
• 🤖 GitHub Copilot is evolving into a peer programmer, capable of autonomously completing tasks like bug fixes, new features, and code maintenance.
• 🛠️ App modernization is integrated into Copilot, enabling upgrades of frameworks (e.g., Java 8 to 21) and migration of on-premise apps to the cloud.

Azure AI and Agent Foundry

• ☁️ The Azure SRE Agent autonomously triages, mitigates issues, and generates incident reports.
• 🧠 Microsoft 365 Copilot is enhanced with agents like Researcher and Analyst, synthesizing information from web and enterprise sources with deep reasoning.
• 💬 Microsoft Teams now integrates chat, search, notebooks, create, and agents, serving as the UI for AI, with search spanning across applications like Confluence and Google Drive.
• 📈 Copilot tuning allows enterprises to build custom agents fine-tuned on company data, workflows, and style, inheriting source control permissions.
• 🔄 A new model router automatically selects the best OpenAI model for tasks, enabling multimodal capabilities.
• 🌟 Grok from XAI is coming to Azure, with provisioned throughput usable across multiple models.
• 🏗️ The Azure AI Foundry and Agent Foundry offer a platform for building declarative agents with few lines of code, supporting multi-agent orchestration and general availability.
• 💻 Foundry Local brings app server and app building capabilities to the edge and clients, with a fast runtime and CLI for local development on Windows and Mac.
• 🚀 The Windows AI Foundry extends the platform for the full dev lifecycle across CPUs, GPUs, NPUs, and the cloud, with Foundry Local integrated for running pre-optimized models locally.
• 🔗 WSL is now fully open source, and NLWeb allows websites and APIs to easily become agentic applications.
• 🗄️ Cosmos DB is integrated into Foundry for conversational history and RAG applications, and also into Fabric for unifying data estates with semi-structured data.
• 📊 Shortcut transformations in OneLake offer AI-driven ETL, with pre-built AI-powered transformations like audio to text and sentiment analysis.
• 🔬 Microsoft Discovery is announced, built on Foundry, to apply AI agents to scientific workflows and R&D, understanding domain-specific knowledge.

Security and Governance

• 🔒 Agents built in Foundry and Copilot Studio automatically appear in an agent directory in Entra ID, with their own identity, permissions, and access controls.
• 🤝 Partnerships with Service Now and Workday will automate agent provisioning and management via Entra ID.
• 🛡️ Purview integrates with Foundry for end-to-end data protection, and Defender integrates to protect agents from threats like wallet abuse and credential theft.